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Don’t Wait To Update Your Apple Products

By Bob Hooper for Island Eye News

I will get to last column’s note about the “cloud” shortly, but let’s talk first about your iPhone and iPad and the latest iOS update—9.3.5— which came out recently and has a security update that has been on the news and on the Internet. If you missed it, update now.

The update “fills” a hole that allowed the bad guys to insert bad stuff onto your iPad/iPhone through a bug called “Pegasus.” This was actually found by a company called Citizen Lab and supposedly comes from a group called Trident. Thanks, Citizen Lab.

On Sept. 2, an update came out for Safari and OS X El Capitan and Yosemite, which again you should update right now. It covers the same problems and what are called “zero day” attacks.

With Apple/Mac products I usually wait a week or two for an update to see if any changes occur, or I see if others (the guinea pigs) find problems, but with this update, please do it now.

Now onto the “cloud.” What is that thing? It is really up there in the sky? Where does my stuff go when I “put it on the cloud”?

The “cloud”— whether it’s iCloud, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or another company offering to keep your data safe—is really just a “server” sitting somewhere. So a company either has a bunch of machines with lots of data storage (hard drives) or “rents” the storage from someone—like Amazon—and then your data is “stored” there.

That’s the cloud! Yep, your data is sitting on a hard drive in a huge building out in the desert outside Las Vegas owned by Amazon, rented by “Insert name here.” And then you have a link to it through what is called a VPN or some other means (a website for example) where you can access it. So the next time someone says their stuff is in the “cloud,” don’t look up!

Looking forward to some good questions and helping you out. If you need immediate assistance, you can always call Rent A Bob at 843.822.7794 or at rentabob@live.com.